Lactose intolerance: More common than you think

The problems seemed ‘sporadic’ but frequent. His doctors never suggested lactose intolerance. We could have done a food elimination test, but that was time consuming and very inconvenient. In hindsight we should have done the slog of eliminating foods from the diet…but you know what they say about hindsight? (Or at least the Phantom Tollbooth).

This is interesting, because I know several people who went through something similar. The vast majority of Northern Europeans are lactose tolerant, at least judging by phenotype and that particular SNP. But, at least ~5% are not. That’s not a small number in absolute terms, and even proportionally it is common enough that if you know 13 random Northern Europeans, there’s a 50% probability that at least one of them is lactose intolerant.

Note: There are other SNPs which likely confer lactose tolerance. And, it seems likely that environmental factors, such as adaptation of your gut flora, also matter in the final phenotype.